Reality Bites

ABC plans a new fall TV show that promises advertisers
â€œseamless product integration.â€? But consumer tolerance
of marketing bombardment is wearing thin.

TV viewers more and more perceive the hand of the
advertiser in what they watch, and breaking down the wall
between story and commercial can wear the fabric of consumer
credulity even thinner.

A new fall CBS show called The Agency will dramatize
the adventures of intrepid and virtuous operatives of the Central
Intelligence Agency. This may give you an idea of how abjectly
stupid the networks take us to be.

The arbiters of our culture often assume that Americans, as
denizens of the empire of consumerism, are simply predisposed to
their wants and needs, namely selling more stuff. And, if such is
not the case, they can simply turn to the unmatched coercive tool
of mass media to change our minds. How else to explain the stunning
growth of the branded, bottled water business in the past decade,
despite studies that indicate that, though a thousand times as
costly, it offers no more purity or health benefits than most tap
water? The brand is king, they tell us again and again, and
Americans love them and just want more. How else, indeed, to
explain the upcoming ABC â€œreality TVâ€? series The
Runner, promising unprecedented â€œseamless product
integrationâ€? within the show?

Marketing and media largely occur in imagination-free zones,
dictated by formula and facsimile. The success of CBS's
Survivor and ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
last year, sent networks into rabid me-tooism as they tried to put
marginally different spins on the formula of real people supposedly
reacting spontaneously to competitive, pressure situations. In the
ensuing months, we've been set upon by hype for CBS's Big
Brother and Survivor II, NBC's Weakest Link,
UPN's Chains of Love, ABC's The Mole, and FOX's
Temptation Island and Boot Camp (for which one
episode promo promised one â€œrecruitâ€? would pay
â€œthe ultimate priceâ€? â€” if he did, in fact, die,
we missed it). John Langley Productions, producer of Cops,
was even said to be making a â€œreality TVâ€? movie in
which a cast of â€œrealâ€? people is stalked by a
presumably role-playing psycho.

The allure here is simple: These shows are sort of sports with
crossover appeal. Reality TV combines the â€œliveâ€?
qualities of the Game of the Week â€” spontaneous
actions, uncertain outcomes â€” with the voyeurism of The
Jerry Springer Show, and the hackneyed, ongoing narrative of a
soap opera. The combination draws the rare broad swath of numbers
in the 18- to 49-year-old range. And like sports, the shows' overt,
competitive set-up offers the network â€œvalue-addedâ€?
sales opportunities. AT&T integrated its ad buy on
Millionaire with on-air tags on â€œlifelineâ€?
calls. Survivor offered in-show product or ad placement
with every media buy, its participants shod in Reebok sneakers, for
example, and competing to win a Pontiac Aztek SUV. The
Runner, scheduled to debut this fall, seems only to ride the
Zeitgeist to the next level.

The show will feature a title player roaming the country,
performing tasks that will likely involve advertisers' products or
services, and accumulating prize money as he goes. Viewers can
track him at a Web site, and if they catch him, can snare the money
or prizes for themselves. Since the show will air on a network
owned by Disney, we can expect the runner to dine at McDonald's
â€” Disney's promotional partner for the past 10 years. And as
he will be at large in America, not some remote jungle, nearly
every other endeavor he undertakes has the potential for an
advertiser tie-in.

ABC's prime-time publicity department told American
Demographics it had no information as yet on The
Runner. But the network's sales chief, Mike Shaw, earlier told
the AP, â€œWe're not going to commercialize the hell out of the
show. It's a television show, first and foremost.â€?

But herein lies the rub. A television show â€œfirst and
foremostâ€? is an evolving thing. Standard ad sponsorship of
programming is becoming a problematic model for those who depend on
it. Networks continue to struggle with the zap habits of ad-wary
consumers, whose circumvention powers grow as digital recording
products like TiVo proliferate. Beyond VCR fast-forwarding, the
number of viewers who switch channels at commercial breaks has
roughly tripled to 36 percent since 1985, as has the number of
viewers who mute the sound during â€œwords from our
sponsors,â€? to 23 percent, according to Roper Starch
Worldwide.

Such viewing habits have media sellers and advertisers
scrambling to get their messages in front of consumers less
empowered to circumvent them. A GAO report last year drew some hard
critical attention to marketers targeting school children. Aside
from obvious cases of glowing pop machines in hallways and the
ad-supported Channel One, now in 25 percent of middle and high
schools, the report cited ZapMe, a firm that supplied free
computers that flash banner ads continuously, collects consumer
data on students, and feeds it back to its advertisers. Even beyond
the hot button of commercialized schools, ads now pop up in
streaming news feeds in office-building elevators, check-out
separator sticks in supermarkets, and even on coffee cups. And in
the ad bastion of commercial TV, many are looking to embedded brand
and product placement, or â€œseamless integration,â€? as an
ad sales wave of the future.

But what's good for the goose doesn't necessarily scream
â€œwin-win,â€? to use network exec parlance. Consumers, in
systematic pattern, are showing an unmistakable
â€œwear-thinâ€? factor to the marketing bombardment.
According to Roper Starch, those finding it â€œquite
acceptableâ€? to see ads on shopping carts have declined 9
percentage points since 1996, to 32 percent, while their general
tolerance has declined 11 points, to 31 percent, regarding
pre-movie ads, and 8 points for in-flight programs, to 18 percent.
Seventy-six percent of consumers feel advertising is â€œshown
in far too many places now, you can't get away from it,â€? up
10 points from 1998. Some 64 percent characterize advertising as a
â€œnuisanceâ€? that â€œclutters upâ€? TV, up 5
points since 1998, while 7 percent more think the same of magazine
and online advertising. Meanwhile, those who feel advertising
â€œprovides useful informationâ€? have declined 5 points
since 1998, to 74 percent, while those who find it â€œoften fun
and interestingâ€? dropped 5 points to 65 percent.

Even ZapMe, now operating under the name rStar, has curtailed
its in-school business focus, citing public blacklash against its
methods.

â€œThere's a much greater perception that we're in a
â€˜marketing cultureâ€™ today,â€? says Jon Berry, vice
president at Roper Starch. â€œOur focus group people play back
some of the responses they get and people are talking in marketing
terms the way past generations used sports or war termsâ€¦It's
a reflection of longer-term factors, like education. A high school
degree, which was not a common thing in 1960, is universal today.
Half of Americans have been to college. With education comes
greater self-confidence, and as people get more confident, they get
more skeptical, more restless about being dictated to. While that
has a benefit to people, as educated consumers who can shop around
and get better prices, it can also make marketing a more invasive
thing in their minds.â€?

Thus, a cycle is created. The wary consumer requires more wile
on the marketer's part, and that wile, if recognized as such,
further inures the consumer. TV viewers more and more perceive the
hand of the advertiser in what they watch, and breaking down the
wall between story and commercial can wear the fabric of consumer
credulity even thinner. The Runner's proposed
â€œseamless integrationâ€? is one thing, but increasingly,
corporate executives seem oblivious to consumers' capacity to
perceive the seams.

To wit, 82 percent of consumers see â€œentertainment and
popular cultureâ€¦dominated by corporate money, which seeks
mass appeal over quality,â€? according to a
BusinessWeek/Harris poll conducted last year. And a
whopping 74 percent of Americans gave the business community
â€œonly fairâ€? or â€œpoorâ€? marks when it comes
to â€œbeing straightforward and honest in their dealings with
consumers and employees.â€?

The BusinessWeek article that accompanied the poll
results warned of a growing citizen predisposition against the
corporate community. The Roper Starch numbers above reveal that
such antipathy is manifest toward companies' brands and practices
on a mass-market level, not merely the narrow province of
overprotective parents or progressive protesters in Seattle or
Quebec. Bottled water aside, they increasingly demonstrate a level
of incredulity that does not bode remotely well for those trying to
sell them stuff, however â€œintegratedâ€? their pitch.

The author should disclose that he doesn't understand the lure
of such artless pabulum as Survivor or
Millionaire, which is to fully allow that The
Runner could become a big hit. We can, however, posit that
ABC, in simply flogging the latest hot buttons of marketing and
media, risks further exposing itself as a mere gossamer conduit of
ever more discordant corporate propaganda.